Lighter Fluid
by thermodynamic
Summary: Twenty facts about Steve Randle, in no particular order.


Steve is kind of uncharted territory for me, so I hope you guys enjoy this more experimental piece :)

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1.

He doesn't _hate_ Ponyboy; no matter what the kid wrote in that little theme of his, he's part of his gang and he'll have his back even if he resents the necessity. What he hates is the state of perpetual babyhood he exists in. He was a mama's boy— half of Steve's childhood memories are groaning when Mrs. C told him to include the brat— and after his parents' deaths, Darry and Soda (especially Soda) wrapped him in a protective cocoon. When Socs had a blade to his neck, he yelled and knew help would come running.

Nobody has ever taken care of Steve. He wouldn't know how to handle it if they did.

2.

When Dallas Winston cruises onto the scene, a fourteen-year-old hood with a Brooklyn accent who brings a switchblade to study hall, Steve wants to hate him. Dallas is older, and taller, and better-looking; he gets more broads without trying, even though he goes through them like underwear and treats them like garbage; he can whip just about anyone from this side of town and most of the guys in the organized gangs. Worst of all, he's always got this smug, shit-eating grin on his face, whether he's angry or sad or disappointed or hurt, that says 'you don't know me. You never will. Nothing can fucking touch me.'

But Steve is still Soda's best friend, and he'll parade that favor around like it means anything.

3.

He should feel a connection with Dally because their mamas are both gone, but he doesn't. For all that bravado, the bluster, the shit-talking, there's something inside Dallas that craves mothering— makes Mrs. C want to mop up his bloody noses and scold him out of trouble. He calls her 'Mom' to her face, without hesitation or shame, accepts what Steve cringes away from.

Steve already had one mother disappoint him. He doesn't need another.

4.

He meets Sodapop Curtis on the playground, the first day of second grade. "Your daddy's a redskin," Larry Beckett crows next to the swingset, using a word he doesn't fully understand but still grasps the power of. "I _seen_ him, he's got hair down to his _ass_. My daddy says you shouldn't even be allowed to come here with normal people."

Soda has such an expressive face, the look of hurt he wears is so acute it's physically painful, and he turns to Steve like he's looking for a savior. So Steve is only too happy to pound Larry's mug into the dirt, even though he gets a split lip for the trouble and a paddling for starting the fight— Soda's mom bakes the best cookies and he always shares after that.

Later that year, their teacher says she shouldn't be surprised Soda can't read, redskins aren't much good at school. Steve wants to punch her too, but he doesn't.

5.

The last time Steve sees his mama is December 14th, 1955. She's crying, wiping at the trails of snot and mascara coming down her face (she cries even harder when she prods the edges of her black eye). She kisses him on the top of the head (he recoils from the smell of sherry on her breath). She promises to call soon (she never does).

When Steve thinks back to this, to the pathetic figure she cuts in his residual memory, he doesn't want to comfort her. He wants to tell her to suck it _up_ and stick around, because his daddy forgot Christmas that year and never remembered again.

6.

Steve hates it when women cry, and when they tell him what to do, and when they mix themselves up in men's business. So he doesn't expect to care much when Evie's face crumples, as he feels the bite of handcuffs around his wrists, spits blood at the pig trying to wrestle him into the backseat of the car. "We're through," she says, her voice hitching on a sob, "we're through if you're runnin' around like some no good hood. I ain't gonna wait for you like my mama waited."

No stern, parental lecture from Mr. C, no belt blow from his old man, no silent smirk from his PO has ever made him want to go clean as much as those tears.

7.

Steve's daddy is a mean fucking drunk. Soda's daddy is a drunk too, but he's not a mean one, so Steve all but moves into Soda's house.

8.

God knows it's not a tuff thing to admit— you can get beat up for carrying books home, if you're walking through the wrong hood at the wrong time— but he's good at school, genuinely good, even though he never studies. Too bad the teachers ain't so eager to encourage a greaser with slicked-back hair and sagging jeans to hope for more than pumping gas. He gets a sick thrill from knowing all the right answers whenever they try to catch him not paying attention, anyway.

A few times he's allowed himself to fantasize about college, even though he hasn't got a red cent to pay for it— then Darry, football champion, Boy of the Year, ends up stuck at home roofing houses. He puts every ounce of disappointment into calling him 'all brawn and no brains', and only regrets it when Soda ices him out, not when Darry's fist crashes into his jaw with the speed of a freight train.

9.

The day Soda's old man gets back from the big house, is the first day both of them light up.

Steve is eleven, almost twelve. He stole the smokes from the top of his daddy's dresser drawer, and doesn't particularly care if he gets it when he returns home— he wouldn't have felt right showing up empty-handed. Soda is sitting on the porch, shivering in the January cold, picking at his bloody cuticles.

"So... he's back." He can't think of anything else to say.

"Yeah." Soda's breath makes a little cloud. He's wearing one of Darry's sweatshirts, drowning in it.

"How is it?"

"Weird."

"You want one of these?" Steve waves the pack of Lucky Strikes around like he smokes every day, fumbles with the lighter. "To... celebrate?"

It's the start of a lifelong habit.

10.

He gets into a fistfight with Two-Bit over who can ask Evie Smith out, in the parking lot of Jay's. Two-Bit wins, because he's a year and a half older and has arms full of newfound ropey muscle, but he lets Steve go ahead in the end, says he prefers blondes anyway. That's Two-Bit for you.

Evie has long, dark hair that smells like strawberries and clear blue eyes from behind all her mascara. She tells him about how she wants to be a nurse after she graduates, and knows how carburetors work, and laughs with her mouth wide open when she's drunk. She takes her skirt off, unprompted, on the third date.

Steve thinks he might be in love.

11.

Every time Steve's dad throws him out, he gives him five or six bucks to make up for it. It's kind of a paycheck.

He likes the money, the way it feels in his pocket, the smokes and booze and pills it can buy. He doesn't like the screaming that shakes the walls, the power that always goes out the first of the month, or getting shoved out the front door and told not to come back as much.

Sometimes his old man says he's the reason his mama walked out. There's not enough money for enough booze on earth to make him forget that.

12.

He's not sure why he cusses Sylvia out so spectacularly when he sees her sniffing after Johnny, her scarlet nails digging into his shoulder, suffocating him with her drugstore perfume. Maybe he feels obligated to stick up for Dally. Maybe he sees the interest in Johnny's eyes, the way he curls closer to that serpent in a girl's body, and nothing could stop him from stepping in then.

"You don't fuck with no man's girl," he tells Johnny, yanking him into a headlock. "You hear me? 'Specially not if he's practically your _brother_. A sneakin' broad like that could you get you into a lot of a trouble."

Kid's all messed up, from getting smacked around like a piñata at home— he needs someone to teach him how to act. Steve can be that someone.

13.

There's not enough time to process Johnny dying before Dally makes a frantic phone call; before they race down to the lot and watch him raise an empty gun; before he's pumped full of bullets and his blood's seeping into the pavement. It all moves so fast, too fast.

Steve has never seen someone die before. He doesn't know what to do. He stumbles forward, and then he cries a little, and then he goes home and drinks a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon in one go.

He feels like his father. He feels _good_.

14.

Soda doesn't get a draft letter— he marches right down to the recruitment office a few days after his eighteenth birthday and gets himself a one-way ticket to 'Nam. "Army pays better than the DX," is all he has to say about it, even when Darry cusses him out loud enough to be heard from three blocks away.

Steve wishes he had the balls to run down to Mexico or stick a barrel in his mouth or just fucking enjoy the adrenaline rush of going to war. Instead he waits for the letter to come like it's the Sword of Damocles, something inescapable, and wonders what it'll be like to kill. It can't be too hard, if even Johnny could do it.

15.

He was lying about holding off those Socs with a busted pop bottle, just gassing himself up. Sheesh, who knew the kid was so damn _gullible_?

Then again, he also bought Soda's line about 'getting high off life'...

16.

His mama sends him a Christmas card one year. In January.

He throws it out and forces himself to forget the return address.

17.

Fighting Socs means chasing his own tail, no matter how many fights he wins and how many noses he breaks. Stealing hubcaps for the Tiber Street Tigers means the taste of gold between his teeth.

Soda refuses to push drugs for them. Sometimes Steve does. He feels filthy, but he likes having a new leather jacket and enough cash to take his girl out more than he liked having a clean conscience.

18.

His cousin Faye comes down to visit the summer she's fifteen— her mama drank herself to death, and her rich-ass daddy is all too happy to pawn her off on some relatives for a few months, even an unknown brother-in-law who can barely keep his own son fed. He'd like her a lot better if she just figured out where her loyalties lay.

"I can't believe you," he says as she applies a fresh coating of lipstick before her date with Bob Sheldon. Steve doesn't like him, the way the rings on his fingers glint, the icy arrogance on his face. "Just hangin' around Socs— it ain't right. They ain't our kind."

Faye looks at him with the green eyes they both share, narrows them. "I ain't from here. I don't have a _kind_." She teases the hair around her face as a horn blasts off outside— Sheldon thinks he's too good to come to the front door. "He's not so different from your friend Dally, you know."

He doesn't fully grasp the meaning of that until Ponyboy says it.

19.

Steve shows up at the Curtis house after another fruitless afternoon of interrogating Dally, trying to get Johnny and Ponyboy's location out of him, and finds Soda ass-deep in one of his daddy's old whiskey bottles.

"Sandy's pregnant," he hiccups, by way of explanation.

"Fuck."

"It ain't mine."

"That _bitch_ ," Steve exhales, and he's shocked to find that sparks don't come out of his mouth when he says it. "That fucking cooze."

"Don't call her that." Soda's voice lashes at him, before he buries his head in his hands. "I would've married her anyway, you know? But her old man says he's sendin' her down to Florida, she ain't marryin' no sixteen-year-old kid."

Steve never really trusts Soda's judgement after that.

20.

The worst part of 'Nam isn't coming back all changed. It's not the nightmares, the trembling hands, the horrible, sinking feeling as the United States army loses to a bunch of peasants with broomsticks and makeshift bombs, 1975, Communist troops rolling through Saigon.

It's Soda showing up at his doorstep, his arms obliterated by a blitz of track marks, begging for money for another hit please God just one more. He looks like he'll keel over if he doesn't get it. He looks like a dead man walking.

Nobody has ever taken care of Steve. He doesn't know how to take care of someone else, either.


End file.
